Dragon Ball Super: Beerus

A ground-up remake of the 2015 Dragon Ball Super anime, now rebranded as Dragon Ball Super: Beerus. Toei is re-adapting the first three arcs of the original run — Battle of Gods, Resurrection of F, Universe 6 — with new animation, new shading, a rougher Broly-movie line, and a new opening dream sequence as a bridge. Japanese audio with English subs on Hulu, no dub announced. Episode one picks up where Dragon Ball Z left Goku and Vegeta, then detours into the arrival of Beerus, the purple cat god from a higher plane who has been asleep for decades and has heard a rumor about a Super Saiyan God.

The animation. That's the whole pitch, and it mostly lands. Toei has pushed the look closer to the theatrical Broly movie and the recent Daima series — thicker outlines, moodier shading, weightier impact frames. Punches sound heavier, Beerus moves with the lazy menace he was always supposed to have, and backgrounds have actual depth instead of the flat 2015 TV-budget wash. Masako Nozawa is still Goku. Kōichi Yamadera's Beerus still purrs through every scene like he's bored of the universe. For anyone who bounced off the original because it looked like a daytime filler episode of Z, this is the version the arc deserved a decade ago.

It's a remake, and it shows. Levelup and the fan reaction flagged exactly the problem: the dream-fight cold open is the only genuinely new material, and the rest is re-storyboarded scenes you already know beat for beat. Fight choreography is sharper than 2015 but still not at the Daima bar it's being compared to. The heavy shading is divisive — some shots look like keyframes from a prestige film, others look like someone turned the contrast knob too far. And the pacing is the pacing of 2015 Dragon Ball Super, which means a lot of reaction shots and power-level exposition that a 2026 edit could've trimmed.

If you've seen Battle of Gods and Resurrection of F in theaters, you already know every story beat coming. This is for the lapsed fan who wants to put Dragon Ball on in the background while they do something else, and for the Daima crowd that wants the next hit of Toei's upgraded house style. If you've never watched Dragon Ball in your life, start with Z or Kai, not this. And if you demand new story from your anime remakes the way Brotherhood gave you new story, you'll be bored by episode two.

BACKGROUND TV because the ambition tops out at "prettier." The craft on screen is real — the shading, the sound design, Yamadera's Beerus — but the writing is a decade-old script Toei isn't reworking, just repainting. There's no new argument here, no reframing, no reason to lean in. It's a nostalgia object with a bigger budget, and it plays best with half your attention on it. No lecture problem, no messaging swerve. Just a studio redoing its homework in nicer handwriting and asking you to grade it again.